November 2011

Outrage: New York Times Reports that Ohio State’s Football Coach to Earn up to $4 Million a Year
We’re living in a time when students are protesting tuition increases and tens of thousands of college graduates are drowning in debt. Yet according to “For New Coach at Ohio State, It’s First Down and $4 Million,” an article by Greg Bishop in The New York Times on November 29, Ohio State University sees no problem in offering its new football coach a compensation package that could add up to $4 million annually. Or to look at it another way the new coach, Urban Meyer, should be compensated a total of $26 million over the next six years.
Some details from the article . . .
The compensation package includes a ...

Forty Degrees Below Zero and Dropping . . . Occupy Alaska Protestors Are the Most Determined of All
Talk of your cold! through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn’t see.
- “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” a poem by Robert W. Service (1874-1958)
Anyone who doubts the commitment of Occupy protestors needs to know about the hardy protestors who are part of the Occupy Alaska movement. According to a recent report on Reuters, Occupy protestors in Anchorage and Fairbanks are stalwartly refusing to give up and fold their tents, even after spending several weeks camping outside in temperatures that have plunged to minus 40 ...

Go Back to College on Your Own Terms
Last year I donated my 1973 Volkswagen Karmann-Ghia to charity. Why? Because it was so doggone scary to drive. Way back when I bought the car in 1981, it didn’t feel that way. My wife and I actually took a 600-mile road trip in it one summer. But the older the car got, the scarier it got, especially in comparison to the modern cars that we drive now – cars that can actually start, merge into highway traffic, go around corners, and stop when you apply the brakes. The only air bag that was ever in the Karmann-Ghia was an aunt of mine who couldn’t stop talking.
Well, cars aren’t the only things that have improved over the last few decades, or gotten less scary. Take college, for example. Back in ...

New Study: Nearly One-Third of All College Students Are Now Taking Courses Online
If you think that American students and colleges are embracing online study slowly, perhaps it’s time for you to think again.
"The rate of growth in online enrollments is 10 times that of the rate in all higher education," says Elaine Allen, co-author of “Going the Distance: Online Education in the United States, 2011,” a study released by The Sloan Consortium.
We’re talking about a major study here, based on data from a large number of colleges and universities. A total of 4,523 institutions were invited to take part, and 2,512 agreed and submitted data.
So, what did the study determine about online learning? Here are the key findings . . .
...

New College Course Profile: Western Civilization I
StraighterLine introduced some terrific new college courses. Today, we’d like to tell you more about one of them.
It is the new StraighterLine Western Civilization I course.
It’s a comprehensive course that is designed to fulfill the requirement for curricular Western Civilization courses at hundreds of colleges and universities across America. Even more, it offers a great overview of western history that can provide a firm foundation if you are thinking of majoring in history or political science.
Here are some course highlights . . .
A comprehensive overview of the development of early civilizations from Neolithic times to 1715.
Early and contemporary Western cultures are ...